In 1973, aged 21, Daniel Meadows refitted a 1948 doubledecker as the “Free Photographic Omnibus” and set out on a 14-month journey around England offering portraits, gratis, to all-comers. In the back window of the bus was a Letraset sign to give punters an idea of the project: Meadows was in the business, it proclaimed, of capturing “how things are and how they are changing”. With this in mind, he covered 10,000 miles and made audio recordings along with his pictures, selling the idea to his subjects that their images and thoughts would be preserved for history. That hopeful pitch came true. The archive of Meadows’s journey was bought by the Bodleian Libraries in 2018. A selection of the pictures and fragments of reporting from his journals and recordings are now collected in a new Book of the Road.
This image was taken during a couple of days in the Northumberland town of Haltwhistle that began at the Railway Inn, where Meadows, his diary records, played darts and sank several pints with some friendly ex-miners. Subsequently, he pitched up at the local bingo hall and, in breaks from “eyes down” games, talked to some of the regulars there. One, Moira Little, gave him a potted history of the place, which had been a music hall for the troops stationed nearby before they left for France in 1914, the stage featuring “stars like George Formby, Gracie Fields”. “After that,” Little said, “we had the silent films with a man playing the piano in the corner here” and then there were talkies. The bingo had taken over in the late 60s. “After the bingo was over,” Meadows reports, for posterity, “I went through to the Railway Inn again and did some pictures in the folk club… Retired to bed, pissed, about midnight.”
Book of the Road is published by Bluecoat Press. An exhibition, Free Photographic Omnibus, 50th anniversary, is at the Centre for British Photography, London SW1 until 17 December
